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How-To Geek

Looking for an easy way to deal with those annoying flash elements in webpages while browsing with Chrome? Now you can with the BlockFlash2 User Script.

Prepare Chrome for User Scripts

To add user scripts to Chrome, you will need to do a little bit of prep work to get everything ready. Locate the shortcut(s) for Chrome and right click on them. Select “Properties”.

Once you have clicked through, you will see the “Properties” window with the “Shortcut” tab displayed.

In the address area for “Target:” you will need to add the following command to the end of the target path making certain to leave a single space in between the final quote mark and the enable user scripts command.

Here is an example of what the the target path should look like…

Once you have that finished, click “Apply”, then “OK”.

Place the User Script in the Appropriate Location

Now that you have all of your shortcuts ready, it is time to place your new user script in the User Scripts Folder. First, you will need to locate the Google folder in your AppData Directory.

If you do not have a folder named “User Scripts” in the Default Folder, then you will need to create one. Make certain to include the “s” at the end. All that you need to do after that is add your new user script to the folder.

Note: When you download the user script, it will have the following name: “45343.user.js”. We have replaced “45343” with “blockflash2” to make it easier to tell different user scripts apart as we add in additional scripts later.

BlockFlash2 in Action

How does it look after setting up the user script? We decided to visit NBC’s Merlin website for our example. As you can see, two flash elements are displaying as hidden and are designated by the yellow text boxes. To access a hidden flash element click on “[Play Flash]”…

And there is our hidden flash element displaying without any problems. To re-hide a flash element, simply click on “[Stop Flash]”.

Conclusion

BlockFlash2 makes a nice addition to Google Chrome…access what you want and hide the rest!

I have done a similar thing a little while back. I was looking for a way to block troublesome flash based ads in linux, because on my old laptop, some of those make the browser stop responding, or at least causes substantial slowdown to the system. In doing a bunch of research, I found an extension for Chrome that will block ads. It isn’t nearly as featureful as Adblock+ for Firefox (ability to whitelist or only block certain things), in fact there are no options at all. But it was the only solution I could find for linux, although I wasn’t looking for any userscripts.

I had to add –enable-extensions to my chrome launcher (same as adding the userscript option that Asian Angel mentioned). Then on the later windows version you can probably just click on that crx file and it will install it, but on linux, I had to save the file to ~/.configs/chrome/extensions or something similar (laptop is at home, and I am at work) and then restart chrome. You can verify it is running by going to about:extensions

@ablevins – You should be able to run both command switches at the same time…I myself have four command switches set up for my Chrome install. ^__^ Just make certain to have a single-space in between your command switches. ^__^

@Eight_Bit: Right-click the Install link on the userscripts.org page and Save As…

Is there a different path for XP? I don’t have an AppData folder, so I put this in “C:\Documents and Settings\Greg\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\User Scripts” and it seems to have no effect. Is there a way to tell if the script has been loaded or not?

Searched the forums but couldn’t find anything on this. Running the latest stable version of Chrome, and can’t find the Chrome folder inside the Google folder in Appdata. I’m running Vista, unsure if it’s service pack 2 or not. The folders that show up are ‘Fast Search’ and ‘Google Gears for Internet Explorer’ (which I don’t use, but is installed). Any suggestions?